Western Digital Announces New Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB Hard Drive

Enabling new lower levels of total cost of ownership (TCO) for cloud and enterprise customers, Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC) today introduced the Ultrastar® DC HC530 hard drive – at 14TB, no other CMR (conventional magnetic recording) hard drive in the industry offers a higher capacity. The breadth and depth of big data is driving the universal need for higher capacities across a broad spectrum of applications and workloads. Built on Western Digital’s fifth-generation HelioSeal technology, the Ultrastar DC HC530 drive is designed for public and private cloud environments where storage density, watt/TB and $/TB are critical parametersfor creating the most cost-efficient infrastructure.

The data explosion caused by big data, IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, rich content and fast data applications is challenging hyperscale cloud data centers and enterprises to efficiently build massive petabyte-scale infrastructures. This ability to cost-effectively scale-up or scale-out is business critical, not only for cloud service providers but for organizations leveraging big data analytics and machine learning in medical, science, agriculture and other fields seeking innovation, discoveries and unique insights, as well as for creating new business models.

Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Devices, Western Digital, said, “Our enterprise and hyperscale cloud customers demand reliability with the highest capacities and densities to deliver the lowest TCO for business-critical applications. Having invented, brought to market and delivered five generations of industry-leading innovations in helium technology, and with more than 27 million drives shipped, our ability to maintain high quality and reliability have made us the trusted partner of top-tier cloud providers, Internet giants and OEMs around the world.”

A follow-on to the industry’s first 14TB SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drive, the Ultrastar DC HC530 is a 14TB CMR drive that delivers drop-in simplicity for random write workloads in enterprise and cloud data centers. Since 2014, the company’s unique, patented HelioSeal process seals helium in the drive to provide unbeatable capacity, exceptional power efficiency and long-term data center reliability. Its low-power design does not compromise performance, while contributing to its overall TCO advantages. Both SAS and SATA interfaces will be available.

Tencent, a leading global Internet service provider based in China is adopting Western Digital’s HelioSeal-based hard drives for their Tencent Cloud data centers. Huang Bing Qi, director of Tencent Cloud, said, “As the volume of data continues to expand, our customers look to us to provide speed, agility and longevity for a variety of applications, workloads and outcomes. Western Digital’s helium-filled HDDs provide the low-power and high-capacity we need to meet these demands in a cost-efficient and reliable manner. Tencent Cloud has already deployed 12TB HelioSeal HDDs and we are excited to work with Western Digital to qualify the new 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530 drives.”

Features and Specifications

HelioSeal: Western Digital’s fifth generation helium-based drives, based on the exclusive HelioSeal technology

The Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB HDD is currently shipping to select hyperscale cloud customers for qualification. Limited qualification samples are available now to qualified customers. For more information on the Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB drive, visit: http://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-dc-hc530.

The Ultrastar DC HC530 drives will also be available in the company’s high-density data center platforms designed for next‑generation disaggregated storage and software-defined storage (SDS) systems.